Completing the Unresolved Plot of History
Theory, Politics, and Literature in Ricardo Piglia's 'The Way Out' - By Thomas Travers
As part of an effort to foster interest in the work of French philosopher and literary theorist Yves Citton, Jason Read surveys the idea of storytelling and myth in Citton’s thought. Storytelling, Read glosses, establishes a form of “soft power” which captures attention and codes affects and personal experience with broader social and political meaning. With the defeat of revolutionary and reformist movements alike, the imaginary structuring of desire has been dominated by the myths of the right, which channel resentment at economic immiseration, for example, towards figures like the “welfare queen” or predatory migrant. The task confronting any narrative politics of the left, Read argues, must involve the “‘disqualification of the given’, the naturalness and unquestioned nature of the given political and economic order.” One such narrative form intent on denaturalizing the given that might have particular resonance for the readers of this newsletter is conspiracy; a genre whose manic readings of signs and traces has gone into overdrive in recent years. Questioning the existing distribution of economic and political power from below or outside the mainstream, paranoid readings of late have all too often become synonymous with the esoteric mythology of a resurgent right, individuating structural processes - namely, the accumulation of capital - into sects, cabals, and secret networks - or, more bizarrely, the “woke” - who have hijacked an otherwise functioning and democratic system. Ricardo Piglia’s The Way Out encounters a conspiracy of sorts, one whose intellectual figures concede that capitalism has successfully imposed a “belief in its omnipotence and eternality,” but turn to literature to resolve the unfinished plot of history - the emancipation of humanity - and insist on a producing new mythology which, “like Prometheus,” is “prepared to … attack the sun.” In the following post, I would like to further sketch out the novel’s conceptualization of “techno-capitalism,” its theory of anarchist subjectivity, and the role of literature in political struggle.
History
Published in Spanish in 2013, The Way Out belongs to an emerging sub-genre of contemporary literary fiction described by Alex Manshel as the “recent historical novel.” Whereas the historical novel in its dominant form turns to moments and passages in which the prehistory of the present unfolds and acquires shape, the recent historical novel draws on events that “have not yet congealed into a coherent and legible period.” “By fictionalizing the crises of recent history before they become fully historical, the genre,” Manshel suggests, “represents both an acceleration of the novel’s historical imagination and a decelerating double take at the modern news cycle.” “Television” for The Way Out’s first person narrator, Emilio Renzi, “is the same everywhere, the only tenet of reality that persists beyond all changes”; a marker of globalized communication technologies that is also key for anchoring the novel temporally to its mid-1990s setting - mediating such stars as President Clinton and the Chicago Bulls’ Michael Jordan. A writer and journalist of modest fame, Renzi leaves Buenos Aires to take up a visiting lectureship at the prestigious “Taylor University,” a fictional Ivy League college located between Trenton and Newark, New Jersey. Modeled on Princeton - where Piglia taught for several years - “Taylor University” both breaks with the referential pact of historical fiction and foregrounds the ambiguous position of intellectual labor in the late twentieth century. On the one hand, this renaming implies that the university too has been subsumed by capital and subject to the scientific organization of labor: it is a factory that produces both knowledge and standardized workers. On the other, given the prominence of finance and speculation, the name seems oddly anachronistic, an obdurate relic of manufacturing which perhaps gestures to the perceived marginality of traditional humanistic scholarship in an era of effulgent spectacle.
Despite initially seeming like a zany campus novel - one senior literature professor keeps a shark in his basement - The Way Out is in fact composed of a series of discontinuous genres and “autonomous sequences.” That is to say, as well as being a pastiche of university life - likened, not unfavorably, to a “luxury psychiatric clinic” - the novel is also: a comedy of romantic entanglements; a reflection on exile and its doubled identities; consumed by insomnia and paranoia; concerned with crime-detective and state surveillance; and a monument to revolutionary defeats. Renzi is drawn into these various milieus and their respective plots by Ida Brown, a brilliant Marxist literary theorist and academic star, who has invited him to teach a course on the work of the Anglo-Argentine writer William Henry Hudson. Ida and her gifted graduate students are interested in “the traditions of people who set themselves against capitalism from an archaic, pre-industrial position,” collectives who, by founding rural communes, are a class apart. Renzi’s course on Hudson draws earlier narratives of resistance to industrialization into association with the modern environmental movement but also supplies the students with a new figure of refusal, that of the “drifter,” who escapes both capital and class in search of freedom. Reflecting that in Spanish “Ida” means an “action,” “the way out, the journey of no return,” Renzi first follows Ida into a clandestine relationship, spending their weekends together booked into airport hotels under various pseudonyms. Their romance is abruptly halted when Ida is involved in a fatal automobile accident. Trying to reconstruct the unusual circumstances around her death and invest them with meaning, Renzi embarks on a second journey, one which leads him to a secret revolutionary society, a neo-Luddite group called “Freedom Club,” whose campaign of terror Ida might have been a part.
Freedom Club and its explosive virtuoso “Recycler” - nicknamed the “furious Thoreau” by sympathizers in the media - constitutes another bifurcation from the historical novel. Clearly based on the Unabomber, the world-historic individual Theodore Kaczynski enters literature as Thomas Munk, a Harvard educated mathematics prodigy who drops out of a tenured position at UC Berkeley and establishes a dis-alienated good life in rural Montana. Like Kaczynski, Munk, history’s fictional double, orchestrates a mail bomb campaign against the scientific “intelligentsia” who are complicit with accelerating the velocity of technological domination; an operation which individuates the general intellect into its component, corporeally fragile parts. The Way Out incorporates historical minutiae, like the Unabomber’s signature use of Eugene O’Neill postage stamps, but fabricates new victims, introducing further generic discontinuities. Munk’s personal biography and the FBI manhunt it provokes are recounted to Renzi by Ralph Parker, a private investigator Renzi had earlier hired after becoming concerned that the police were linking him to Ida’s accident. In a tacit admission of the waning of the pulp hero, Parker confides that “detectives no longer solve cases, but we can tell stories.” It is through Parker’s shadowy connection with the US state - whose racial crimes he is investigating - that Renzi is granted access to the incarcerated Munk, providing the novel with its political and personal denouement. Although Ida’s involvement is neither confirmed nor denied by Munk, Renzi leaves the interview convinced that her arbitrary death prompted the sensational publication of Munk’s political pamphlet, “Manifesto on Techno-Capitalism.” A source of outrage and admiration, it to this programmatic essay and its defense of nature that I will now turn to consider how the concept of capital is constructed and crystallized in the novel.
Theory
Capitalism, Recycler’s manifesto asserts, is sustained through an infernal capacity to both extend its reach - the colonization of space - and implement “technological renewal” - capturing time, intensifying exploitation and increasing productivity. In doing so, capital has become a “living organism” reproducing itself ceaselessly: “a Darwinian Mutant, ‘no longer a phantom … but rather an alien’.” This idea of an evolutionary monstrosity, Renzi notes, pays ironic homage to Marx, who famously described capital as “dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” Synthesizing a discussion on Marx and monsters, Jason Read suggests that the vampire, with his “aristocratic demeanor,” belongs to a period of liberal capitalism in which economic exploitation is justified and defended in the name of the progressive improvement of humanity. An “alien” mutation, then, perhaps gestures to a period in which the voracious consumption of the brains and bodies of workers is unshackled from any pretense of social progress and is blindly directed towards capital’s own self-valorization. Furthermore, given that capitalist social relations must reconstitute themselves on an expanded scale, the system, Recycler insists, cannot be moderated or reformed. With a theory of perpetual spatial and temporal expansion in place, the manifesto sets out to narrate its own conjuncture - the still coagulating past-present of the 1990s. The abysmal collapse of the USSR and the ascendance of capital in China are diagnosed as transitions to “a new phase in capitalism’s march in search of empty space”; a territorial conquest which unleashes the immense “new energies” of an “army of consumers and reserve labor” to be “put at the disposal of the market.”
In the Grundrisse Marx writes that “the tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself. Every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome.” Marx’s sketch of capital’s “endless and limitless drive” to transcend natural and historical boundaries is certainly endorsed by Recycler’s vision of an absolute capitalism that has eliminated all political obstacles to its planetary reign. Yet by removing such constraints, society now “confronts its final frontier: its border - its no-man’s-land - ‘the psychological frontier’.” In a tragicomic twist, the “New Man” of socialist modernization has been appropriated by capital, whose scientists have become the “‘engineers of the soul’” anticipated by Stalin. Subjectivity is transformed into a plastic resource from which surplus-value can be continually extracted and the “soul,” as Franco “Bifo” Beradi might say, “is put to work.” That said, Recycler is interested less in the re-composition of labor - in its material, affective, and cognitive forms - and concerned more with what he perceives as the passivity induced by consumption, of commodities and media. Renzi summarizes the argument as follows: “the new man, the ideal citizen, is the addict, devoid of convictions or principles, who only aspires to obtain his dose of the merchandise he craves. Technological society satisfies its subjects: it entertains them and drowns them in an ocean of fast, multiform information.” The addict, here, strives towards passive joys, to pleasures attached to or invested in one particular aspect of the body, desire, or idea. Passive joys are contrasted by Read to “active joy,” a joy that is “not a norm, but the capacity to create norms.” Faced with the enslaved and fragmented joys of the addled consumer, Recycler posits an integral being that can only be reactivated by crossing a counter-frontier: to escape the etherized cruelty of civilization - characterized by “domestication” - one must flee to the wilderness.
Subordinated to the cunning of capital, human societies too have gone on a journey of no return. Political programs leveraged on the emancipation of humanity have either been pacified or obliterated by economic development and the only viable critical position left, Recycler contends, is a heretical one that calls “attention to a world with no way out.” Renzi concedes that with the catastrophic defeats of historical communism and revolutionary decolonization, such “Robinsonism,” with its “illusion of a lone man rebuilding an ideal society on a desert island,” assumes a greater degree of plausibility as “the only way out,” despite Marx’s critique. If Recycler’s skepticism towards a workers’ movement based on the affirmation of labor is shared by thinkers like Moishe Postone and the theory collective Endnotes, their advocacy of communization is eschewed in favor of neo-primitivism and the archaic. In abandoning modernity in search of some unpolluted originary state of physical and spiritual plenitude, Recycler takes “the experiences of Thoreau, the Beat Generation, and Californian Hippies … to the extreme, to war.” The way out is no longer through capitalism but with the registration of its untranscendable horizon, limits detected by a kind of militarized desertion that is self-reflexively aware of its own constitutive impossibility. To exit the temporal domination based on technologies of speed and efficiency, an invisible terrorist network must emerge and be prepared to “kill all those technocrats and capitalist bastards.”
Before discussing the role of literature in Recycler’s mythology of direct action and the invisible multitude it summons, it is worth pausing briefly on the structure and agency mapped so far. In some respects, the subject of The Way Out is neither anarchism nor capital but the United States, whose cultural, political, and social imaginaries the novel theorizes. Given the insistence on the self-reliant frontiersman - the masculine term being deliberate here - Recycler embraces one of America’s foundational myths and, as Renzi notes, is unmistakably the product of a society singularly invested in the fantasy of the “self-made man.” Yet it is precisely this inability to think - and act - beyond the romanticized version of US history which renders such back to nature movements - and their “enraged children” - politically ambiguous at best. Whilst the frontier, in Recycler’s thought, remains an empty space not yet annexed by modernity, Marx suggests that capital’s ingenuity resides in a preternatural ability to takeover and subjugate existing forms of production to its own ends - ruthlessly eliminating those it cannot coexist with, as recorded by the wars of extermination that obliquely structure the novel’s account of the American West. On the other, the hypertrophied attention on technology obscures the extent to which one of the most pressing crises of capitalism is the falling rate of profitability and the production of non-production: not exploited labor but its absence. As Étienne Balibar notes, for the surplus populations structurally excluded from the circuits of accumulation, the globing of the world market has closed the frontier: “you cannot leave it, search for another America, settle there and start again…”
Literature
Published by a group calling itself Freedom Club, the “Manifesto on Techno-Capitalism” concludes with the following injunction: “we are able to accept the end of the world, but no one seems able to conceive of the end of capitalism. We’ve ended up confusing the capitalist system with the solar system. We, like Prometheus, are prepared to accept the challenge and attack the sun.” Whilst the first part of this formulation has become wearingly familiar - and contributes to the novel’s eerily anachronistic mood - the identification with Prometheus and the intention to outrage the so-called natural order reintroduces a certain novelty. Not interested in tendering blueprints for an alternative social order, the narrative politics advanced by Freedom Club nonetheless draws on myth in order to disqualify the given, a historical contingency misrecognized for the cosmos itself. To address the “perpetual problem” of “how to connect thought to action,” FC turn to terrorism, a “broadcast medium” which arrests attention and amplifies their potential readership. “In order to get our message before the public,” FC clinically declare, “we’ve had to kill people.” The terrorist not only becomes the “modern writer,” composing ideas through bombs, but they also replace the “great social fictions”: the “Adventurer” - “who expects everything from action” - and the “Dandy” - “who lives life as an art form.” Combining politics and aesthetics, FC wage an enigmatic war against the capitalist absolute, a war whose incomprehensibility immunizes its actions from reconciliation with the present and defers intelligibility until liberated future historical conditions.
A social fiction galvanizing insubordination from below, the terrorist comes up against one of the dominant myths structuring the United States: the self-interested individual. In “a society that has made its flag out of individualism,” discontent, Renzi observes, can only make itself felt through a hopeless “kind of private political violence” - severed from the institutions and traditions of collective solidarity, the laid off employee, for example, exacts revenge through a shootout rather than a strike. Even the explicitly political demonstrations encountered by Renzi have been “individualized,” contained to lone protesters: “the United States could use a bit of Peronism, it amused me to think, so as to lower the rate of mass murders carried out by individuals rebelling against the injustices of society.” The separation between affects and structures also informs the public discourse around Munk’s atrocities. Indeed, there is a concerted effort to depoliticize Munk’s actions, attributing them to an isolated crank in the grip of psychotic delusions. As Munk points out, given that the US “believes that it is Leibniz’s perfect world,” those who blaspheme against its social norms must either be pathologized as aberrant personalities or dismissed simply as petty criminals. Political opposition is supplanted by psychiatric diagnosis. Yet by waging a “solitary war against global capitalism,” Munk expresses “his culture’s values,” Renzi suggests, “a pure American” whose personal insurrection embodies the failures of the US Left. Thomas Munk’s private-poetic desire to explode the manacles of joyful dependencies by (re)creating norms autonomous from consumer society is thus enlisted in Recycler’s public-political assault on the emergent forms of biopower. The story of Munk/Recycler is a kind of national allegory; however, rather than dramatize the emergence of a people, the novel instead gestures to the absence of such narratives which could nationalize and socialize individual refusals.
One of the questions the novel poses, without solving, is how private narratives can be collectivized and once again become the basis of revolutionary class struggle. Munk, for his part, turns to the work of Peter Kropotkin and agitates for “anarchist subjectivity” as a possible exit from the entropic tendencies of the nineties. On the one hand, the defeats of the twentieth century have brought to a close a “phase” of struggle predicated on “iron-willed organizations,” disciplined clandestine groups and tightly marshalled cadres. In this “new political situation,” the many have become isolated, “subjects in flight,” a scattered “vanguard lost behind enemy lines” engaged in private conspiracies. “United in dispersion, unknown to each other, these groups in fusion are constantly changing,” Munk clarifies, “in direction, in dimensions, in territory, in velocity.” On the other, the one becomes multiple: the individual, Munk summarizes, is always already “an aggregate of power,” a “collective of forces”¾constituted by processes of individuations, as Read might say. The ideological production of a subjectivity that has naturalized the compulsion to work for a wage and effaced the traces of historical contingency is shattered¾so goes Munk’s anarchist wager. Becoming a discontinuous series of affects, psychic states, and ideas, Munk’s individuals are fused with the possibility of turning against the apparatuses of capture and domination. What initially appears as conspiracies of one are actually connected to an invisible chain or network of agents; agents who both contain multitudes and are multitudinous.
If Kropotkin’s thought supplies Munk with a theoretical framework, it is narrative fiction which finally enables him to translate direct action from abstract concept into an incendiary concrete reality. Or this is at least a link Renzi believes he has discovered courtesy of Ida’s heavily annotated copy of The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. In Conrad’s novel, an anarchist cell attempts to blow up the Greenwich Observatory and, in doing so, symbolically demolish Greenwich Mean Time, issuing a clarion call to those exploited by the British Empire’s industrial and colonial domination. Ida’s reading moves a marginal character to the center: a professor who has abandoned an illustrious academic career in order to devote himself to the anarchist cause. For Renzi, Munk belongs to a tradition of readers who decide their actions based on books: “it was as if Munk had found, within literature, a path and a character that would define his clandestine activities. A reader of literature who seeks meaning in literature and then enacts it in his own life.” The name for this fabrication of an “imaginary personality” that deviates from one’s actual situation, Renzi adds, is “Bovarism” and has its origins in the fantastic dreamer and consumer of romance literature, Emma Bovary. “In a society that controls the imaginary and imposes the criteria of reality as a norm,” it is perhaps only by borrowing from literature that the possibilities of history can be outraged and a deadened sense of historical consciousness convulsively reanimated. What this launches, of course, is a kind of madcap adventure: Munk “had chosen to believe in fiction. He was a kind of Quixote who first reads novels furiously and hypnotically, and then sallies forth in order to experience them.”
“Stories,” Read remarks, “attract our attention, and in doing so they shape our future attention and imagination.” Myths, in turn, are required to structure affects and intensities, supplying them with form and meaning; whilst affects themselves rely on a political economy of gestures and actions to activate them. The appeal of literature for Munk lies precisely in its divergence from the present constitution of affects, desires, and gestures under the sign of a futureless horizon. That is to say, whilst one of the abiding myths of the liberal capitalist order is that human societies have reached their apotheosis and there is no alternative, “fictional universes” are, crucially, “incomplete.” “Munk,” Renzi speculates, “had set out to politically complete certain unresolved plots and to act accordingly.” From Conrad, Munk draws on a “restlessness,” on the desire to break with one’s present by inventing a fictional past, a desire which is actualized through gestures like bomb making and manifesto writing. The constitutive incompleteness of fiction opens up a space from which to pull new structuring myths out of the void and combine them with affects and gestures that are primed to disqualify the given¾in particular, the political and economic constitution of wage labor. If the historical movements for emancipation have stalled, it is perhaps time to turn to our favorite imaginary collectives and heroes and to transform their fictional defeats into the basis of our real victories.
Thomas Travers is an independent researcher based in London. Tom's first monograph Peripheralizing DeLillo was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2022. He tweets infrequently @TWLTravers.
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